Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper frowned. ‘What has this got to do with anything?’

  ‘Listen to me. When I first went up to the crash with Ted, we heard two of the airmen talking to each other. They were talking in a foreign language. So we knew they were German.’

  ‘No, it would have been the two Poles you heard,’ said Cooper. ‘It was Zygmunt Lukasz and Klemens Wach. They were speaking Polish.’

  ‘I know that now,’ said Malkin, already starting to get irritated. ‘That’s why we stayed away from the crew, you see. Not that we would have known what to do if we’d found anyone injured. We were going to find a phone and call the police, but then we saw the bags that had been thrown clear of the wreckage. Ted stopped to take a look inside. And we found the money.’

  Malkin paused. He looked across the moor towards the side of Blackbrook Reservoir and opened a field gate in the drystone wall before he continued.

  ‘Ted said there were millions of pounds. It took us days to count the notes, but there wasn’t that much. We could barely carry the bags between us. I was only little, remember, and I soon got tired. We planned to hide them before we called the police. We reckoned everyone would think the bags had been thrown into the reservoir in the crash, because there were plenty of other bits of the aircraft lying all around the edge of the water.’

  ‘I understand all that,’ said Cooper. ‘So what went wrong?’

  Malkin still stared at the reservoir. ‘We saw the light,’ he said. ‘Out on the ice.’

  ‘A light?’

  ‘It was way out in the darkness, and we knew it was in a place no human being could possibly be. It was as if the light was floating in mid-air. You get daft ideas at times like that, but the first thing we thought of was the spirits that are supposed to be on the moor. We thought of ghosts. Even Ted was a bit scared, I think.’

  Malkin seemed almost to be reverting back to his childhood as he spoke. Cooper could picture him as the excited, terrified little boy, in awe of his older bother. It wasn’t all that hard to imagine how the young George Malkin must have felt. There had been times in his own past when Cooper had become almost sick with excitement at some adventure that Matt had got him into.

  ‘And then we heard a voice calling for help,’ said Malkin. ‘It was weak, and there was a funny echo to it. We stood and watched the light moving, and we knew it must be one of the crew from the crashed plane. But we didn’t think he could be alive at first. We thought it was his ghost, just a light and a voice. He was calling for help in English, but we weren’t fooled. We’d heard them speaking in their own language, so we knew they were German.’

  Cooper closed his eyes. ‘They were Polish,’ he said.

  But Malkin didn’t hear him. He was far away, re-living a moment that was permanently etched in his memory. Fifty-seven years had done nothing to weaken his recollection. He was talking now as if it didn’t matter whether Cooper were there or not.

  ‘Then Ted said the airman must be near the edge of the reservoir. He said the dam wall was behind him, because we could hear the echo when he shouted. So we watched the light for a little while longer. I’ve never felt so cold in my life, but part of that was the fear. I knew if we waited much longer, I wouldn’t be able to carry the bag any further. I started to look round for somewhere to hide it, but there was nowhere near. There was only snow. And then Ted said: “He’s on the ice.”’

  ‘The reservoir was frozen over, wasn’t it?’ said Cooper.

  ‘At that far side, it was. The airman was walking across the ice, following the dam wall.’ Malkin paused. ‘I was worrying about the money. The man on the ice was the one thing that seemed to stand between the money and us. He would know it was missing. I said we should put the bags back, but Ted told me not to be stupid. I said the airman would reach the water board road, that he’d be able to walk to the phone box half a mile away. But Ted said: “He won’t reach the road.”’

  Cooper opened his mouth to ask a question, but changed his mind. It would be a mistake to interrupt now. The story was approaching a conclusion. He could feel it in Malkin’s increasing tension, see it in the lines around his mouth, a tightening rictus of fear. Cooper could tell he’d memorised every word that had been spoken as the two brothers stood clutching the leather bags, listening to a voice calling for help.

  ‘And then we both heard it – the cracking,’ said Malkin. ‘It was clear in the night air, and it sounded so loud. It was like the sound of two pieces of metal being tapped against each other, and a little crunch of something breaking. Then the light disappeared. One second it was there, then it was gone. There was no shout or cry from him, not even a splash of water. Maybe a reflection of the flames on a piece of ice as it tilted on the surface. But then the ice fell back, and he was gone.’

  Cooper shuddered, imagining the shock of icy water closing over his head. McTeague would have been dressed in heavy flying boots and a parachute harness. Trapped under a layer of ice, he would have been dead within seconds.

  Now Irontongue had disappeared in the mist, which was rapidly approaching across the moor, racing towards Hollow Shaw, turning the air heavy with the expectation of rain. Cooper could feel the dampness on the back of his neck.

  ‘I didn’t understand what had happened,’ said Malkin. ‘Not until later. When we went up and looked at the reservoir next morning, I saw it was only on the east side that the water was frozen enough to walk on. It had a covering of snow, so it wouldn’t have felt any different to a piece of level ground to a man in the dark. It’s bloody hard work walking across that moor at any time, let alone in snow and in the dark. There are cloughs everywhere to get across.’

  ‘He must already have been exhausted by the time he got to the reservoir,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Aye. He would never have suspected. But on the other side, near the weir, the water was still moving and the ice was thin, not enough to carry a man’s weight. By the morning, there was barely a crack on the surface where he’d fallen in. You know, that bloke had been over Germany, got back home and walked away from a crashed plane. Then he put his life in the hands of two young boys. And we let him die.’

  Cooper knew that his own imagination couldn’t match what Malkin was going through. The man had been over the events of that night too many times.

  ‘I always thought he would come back and haunt us out here, on the moor,’ said Malkin. ‘At nights, he does come back. But only in my nightmares.’

  Cooper stared towards the reservoir, where it lay in a hollow between the snow-covered hills. He nodded, thinking not of Malkin nor even of Danny McTeague, but of Zygmunt Lukasz.

  ‘No forgiving. No forgetting,’ he said.

  And suddenly, Malkin snapped. His face reddened and the veins stood out in his forehead, twisting his face into an unrecognizable expression.

  ‘Do you think I want to remember this?’ he said. ‘Don’t you think I’ve re-lived it often enough already since the night it happened? How many times do you think I’ve had the nightmare in that time? How many?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper.

  ‘How many nights in fifty-seven years?’ said Malkin. ‘Work it out for yourself, clever lad.’

  George Malkin turned and began to walk back towards the farm. Cooper felt for his radio. Should he call in? But it was ridiculous – this was surely an accidental death, fifty-seven years old. The witness had been an eight-year-old boy. After all that had happened recently, everyone would think he’d finally gone mad if he made a drama out of it. Then he saw that Malkin wasn’t heading for the house, but towards the big shed where Rod Whittaker kept his lorry. Malkin slid back the doors and disappeared inside.

  ‘Mr Malkin?’ called Cooper. He began to feel foolish standing in the field. He started to run towards the shed as he heard a diesel engine rumble into life. Cooper peered inside. The DAF wasn’t there, but the big Renault tractor was, along with all its implements lined up against the wall – a hay baler, a harrow, a snowplough blade. George Malkin was sitt
ing high up in the cab of the tractor.

  ‘Mr Malkin!’ shouted Cooper. ‘Do you help Rod Whittaker with his contracting business, too?’

  ‘Nay, I don’t have an HGV licence,’ Malkin called back.

  ‘You can drive this tractor, though.’

  Cooper saw Malkin put the tractor into gear. He dodged round to the side and pulled himself up on to the step to clamber through the passenger door.

  ‘You said Rod Whittaker is contracted by the council. His contract includes clearing the snow sometimes, I bet. It’s much cheaper for the council to pay farmers and local contractors to do it, rather than buy expensive snowploughs of their own.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Malkin, as the tractor began to move.

  ‘So you could take this tractor out with the snowplough attachment, when it’s needed to clear the roads around here?’

  ‘I suppose I could.’

  The tractor bumped across the yard and headed for the open gate on to the moor. Cooper remembered his visit to the Snake Inn, where the staff had said that one of the snowplough crews had stopped to fill their flasks on the morning Nick Easton’s body had been found. But only one crew. They said the crews that came over the Pass from the north weren’t council workers – they were on contract, so it was in their own interests to get the job done quicker. And one of them had been a big tractor with a snowplough. Very early on the job, it was. It would have come over from somewhere near Glossop, they said. It could easily have come from Harrop.

  ‘You could get as far as the Snake Inn, couldn’t you?’ said Cooper over the roar of the engine. ‘Nobody would think twice about a snowplough on the road after it had been closed to traffic. The staff at the inn didn’t. They never saw or heard any other vehicles – just the snowploughs coming down the Pass, and then, later on, another one coming up. The one that found Nick Easton’s body. And I think one of those that came down left him there.’

  Blackbrook Reservoir appeared ahead of them in the mist. Malkin swung the wheel and reversed through the wet peat towards a padlocked gate.

  ‘Stop,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m stopping.’

  Malkin kept the engine running while he climbed down and swung open the gate. Cooper stood clear of the tractor’s wheels, noticing that the padlock on the gate had been cut.

  ‘You helped Frank Baine get rid of the body,’ said Cooper. ‘Did Baine have some kind of hold over you?’

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ said Malkin.

  He backed the tractor towards the edge of the reservoir, where a concrete slipway ran down into the water. Then Malkin fiddled with something at the back of the vehicle, and Cooper saw he had hold of a thick chain with a massive hook on one end. He watched in amazement as Malkin waded into the freezing water and was soon up to his waist. He bent and attached the hook to something under the surface. When he returned to the tractor, Malkin was soaked and white with cold.

  ‘Frank Baine came here a couple of weeks ago,’ he said. ‘He’d worked out that I had the money. I sold a lot of other stuff to Lawrence Daley, and Baine is no fool. He asked Daley where it came from, and put two and two together.’ Malkin climbed back into the tractor cab. ‘Baine said the white fivers were worth a lot. He said they were collectors’ items, that people would pay good money for them, proper money. He offered to sell them for me – in exchange for a cut of the profits, of course. We worked out there was over a hundred thousand pounds’ worth. That was enough to send Florence to America for treatment.’

  ‘It must have seemed like a miracle,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Aye, after all that time, the miracle I’d been praying for. You wouldn’t reckon me to be a man that prayed, would you? But that’s what I’d been doing, and I thought Baine had brought my miracle.’ Malkin shook his head. ‘Then the RAF policeman came. Of course, it was all too late by then. And everything I did after that was pointless.’

  He put the tractor into gear, and the chain tightened. Cooper stood on the edge of the reservoir and looked down. The surface was black and oily with the mud that had been churned up by all the meltwater running into it, full of dark brown peat. Anything could have been lurking down there.

  But as the tractor began to edge forward, it was something metallic and shiny that began to emerge from the water. Bit by bit, recognizable objects became visible. A bumper, a number plate and a back window. Eventually, the car stood on the concrete slipway, water streaming out of it, mud sliding slowly down its windscreen.

  ‘Get your fingerprint kit on that,’ said Malkin.

  ‘It’s Nick Easton’s Ford Focus.’

  ‘Clever lad.’

  This time, Cooper called in. George Malkin waited while he did it. He wasn’t looking at Cooper, but gazing at Hollow Shaw Farm, as if he might be seeing it for the last time. It was the house he’d lived in all his life, the place that had held his secrets.

  Cooper shook his head as he looked at the dripping car.

  ‘So you thought Nick Easton had come to take the money from you?’

  ‘Of course he had,’ said Malkin. ‘Just when I thought I had that fortune in my grasp again, he came to snatch it away. I couldn’t let him do that.’

  ‘So you killed him.’

  ‘It was blind panic. I don’t think I really knew what I was doing.’ Malkin’s voice became a little unsteady. ‘Once he was dead, I didn’t seem to be able to think straight at all. I don’t have any idea what I did for the next few hours, until I realized it was the middle of the night, and by then the snow had started. Rod had already put the snowplough blade on the tractor in case he was needed for road clearing, so I got the body in the back and took it down the Snake.’

  ‘And there were no cars on the road,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You had that right. Nobody bothered about seeing a snowplough. But do you know what? I emptied the bloke’s pockets before I tipped him out, and it was only when I found his keys that it dawned on me he’d have a car. How’s that for stupid? I found the car parked just past the farm. I didn’t see it on the way out, or I might have thought of putting him into the reservoir with it. At the time, all I wanted was to get him as far away as possible. Like I say, I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  Cooper frowned. ‘But how did Nick Easton know you had the money? Who told him?’

  Then Malkin laughed his coarse, gravelly laugh. The noise sounded alien in the damp stillness of the moor.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I told him myself.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Years ago, it was. I’d known the bank notes were worthless for a long time. But they were on my conscience and I couldn’t rest easy thinking that Florence might find them one day. It seemed to me that, if I owned up to the money, I might get the airman off my conscience too – that he wouldn’t appear in my nightmares any more. So I got the number for the RAF Police, and I rang them. I gave them my name and address and told them I knew where the money from the crashed Lancaster was.’

  ‘They would have had no idea what you were talking about.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Malkin. ‘Everyone had forgotten about it, but for me.’

  ‘So what did they do?’

  ‘Not a thing. They thanked me for the information and said somebody might get in touch with me. But nobody ever did. Well, they had better things to do, I suppose. They didn’t care about what had happened all those years ago, and why should they? I suppose they just put a note in a file somewhere about this old idiot at Harrop, and then they left me with my nightmares.’

  ‘Until Andrew Lukasz told Sergeant Easton the story. And Easton must have dug out the old files before he came to Edendale.’

  ‘Aye.’

  For a few moments, Cooper watched the ripples that were still disturbing the surface of the water, breaking sluggishly on the concrete slipway.

  ‘You could hide anything in that reservoir,’ he said. ‘And it might never come to the surface. Danny McTeague’s body never did.’

 
; Malkin’s face contorted again. ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  Cooper misunderstood him at first. He thought Malkin was agreeing with him. But there was something about the tone of the man’s voice, an abruptness that choked the words in his throat.

  ‘Mr Malkin?’

  ‘He came to the surface when the ice began to melt,’ said Malkin. ‘Four days later.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Not at first. The ice gradually began to get thinner – so thin that we could see through it when we stood at the top of the reservoir wall. On the third day, we saw him. He was floating on his back, staring up at us, with his face squashed up against the ice. It was like he was pulling faces at us, sticking out his tongue to say that he’d got the better of us, after all.’

  ‘So what did you do about the body? Didn’t you tell your father?’

  Malkin laughed. ‘Not bloody likely. He’d have beaten us black and blue with his belt and locked us in the coal shed for telling lies. And then he would have told the police. We thought we’d be put in prison for murder. Because we believed we had murdered him, see. It was our fault he died.’

  ‘But if the body had been left there, it would have been found eventually.’

  ‘Nobody found it, because we sent it back down to the bottom. There was a little rowing boat that was kept by the reservoir. We took it and filled it with stones, and we took our dad’s fishing net from his shed. He noticed it was gone one day, but he blamed some gypsies who’d been hanging around.’

  Cooper was starting to feel wet and uncomfortable. He almost wished he could see Irontongue Hill. At least the black buttress of rock would have been something solid and familiar. Yet together, Irontongue and the Malkin boys had been the end of Danny McTeague.

  ‘We tied the ends of the net to the airman’s body,’ said Malkin. ‘We tied it to his flying suit, his parachute harness, wherever we could. Then we filled it with stones and we threw it over the side. We didn’t think he was going to sink at first, then his face stopped staring at us, and the stones pulled him down to the bottom, and all that was left were some bubbles. I kept looking, in case he came back up. I kept looking for months, even when the summer came. I spent so much time sitting staring at this reservoir that my dad thought I was turning peculiar. But the dead airman never came back up.’